Resilience, Virtue Ethics, and Mental Health Care

In the article, we present an expansive approach to the integration of virtue ethics with the concepts of resilience and mental health in the context of service providers, including the military. We ask how a virtue-based approach to ethics might address shortcomings of strictly rule-based, duty-based, and consequence-based perspectives on ethics. In a synthetic approach that employs spirituality as well, the article outlines thirteen dimensions of virtue, focusing on eight of them. It draws virtue-based sources from Western traditions, especially from the works of Aristotle and Aquinas and from personalist approaches.

We address how resilience, as manifest in virtuous acts and dispositions to act, can be understood to have three components applicable across different disciplines: (1) coping with or overcoming grave danger, stress, or trauma; (2) protecting and retaining the integrity of a person or group of people in difficulty; and (3) benefitting from post-traumatic growth.

Drawing insights from virtue-based anthropology, the article integrates contributions from resilience research, virtue ethics, the mental health sector, and the military. It uses examples that include the four cardinal virtues, in general, and other expressions of virtue that are especially pertinent to the context of health care and the military. We ask about the basic capacities, natural inclinations, and human desires that are the bases for the virtues: the intuited, felt, rational, willed, and pro-social experiences through fitting actions to become prepared for the complex and dangerous work of military leaders and soldiers, mental health workers and chaplains, first responders and police, and their families. Throughout the article, we examine the implications of an integrative approach.